Why is it like this?

[MrMacPlus]

When I had to open up my old iMac G3 I discovered that it had a SCSI bus on the mobo, but used an IDE drive. Is this useful for SCSI to IDE? :b&w:

 

[Bunsen]

No.

/edit/ wait, what? SCSI in an iMac? I thought you said PowerMac G3 for a minute there.

/edit/ you might be thinking of the 50 pin IDE connector, which carries power as well as the 40 IDE signals.

 

[LCGuy]

As Bunsen says, its just a proprietary connector for IDE - not even anywhere near close to SCSI. That optical drive is a standard laptop ATAPI CD-ROM with a custom adaptor board on the back. Don't connect that drive to a SCSI bus, and don't connect a SCSI drive to the iMac, otherwise you WILL run the risk of doing serious damage.

 

[MrMacPlus]

I tried hooking a SCSI drive to my iMac a few weeks ago, when I found it out. Oops? No damage done...

 

[tomlee59]

You were lucky not to have damaged something!

If that iMac is the first-generation model, there is a provision for connecting a floppy drive. All you need to do is stuff a socket in the PC board, hook up a superdrive, and you'll be enjoying 1.44MB awesomeness in no time.

 

[MrMacPlus]

It's bad that they used a SCSI connector for the CD/HD drives.

the cable has 3 connectors 50-50-40

 

[Scott Baret]

Tomlee59, does the SuperDrive you connect to the iMac board read 800K disks?

 

[tomlee59]

I believe that it does indeed read (and write) 800K disks, but only under a suitably old OS. 8.x works, 9.x may, OSX certainly not, AFAIK.

 

[MrMacPlus]

Meh, I have at least one old Floppy disk drive from a dell. I can't use it because it isn't ATA.

 

[tomlee59]

Meh, I have at least one old Floppy disk drive from a dell. I can't use it because it isn't ATA.

Well, you can't use it in an iMac for other reasons -- it has to be a Mac floppy drive, not one from the Windows world. Very different interface.

 

[porter]

Meh, I have at least one old Floppy disk drive from a dell. I can't use it because it isn't ATA.

Eh? An IDE floppy drive. Interesting.

Normal PC floppy drives have 34 way shugart mini-diskette style interfaces, then there are also USB floppy drives.

 

[LCGuy]

I think thats what he meant.

 

[tomlee59]

I took his reference to "ATA" to mean "whatever they use in PCs."

An IDE floppy would certainly be an interesting beast!

 

[MrMacPlus]

I said "it isn't ATA"

 

[porter]

I said "it isn't ATA"

It probably isn't RS232 either.

 

[MrMacPlus]

It probably isn't RS232 either.

I wouldn't think so... It shows up in the BIOS as Legacy floppy or whatnot. Looks like IDE but shorter and with different locations that are "hole-less".

 

[Franklinstein]

They do (or at least, did) make IDE-based SuperDisk drives that look almost exactly like floppy drives, mostly because they're just souped-up floppy drives. I have one in my peecee/hackintosh, and it's fairly interesting. It's super fast, even on normal floppies (which is all I use it for), and has a motorized eject. Very nice.

Anywho, those may or may not work in an iMac, but it would be a bit of a hack and you'd lose either the HD or optical drive, and the drive may not work under OS 9. It'd be more useful to do the standard Mac floppy hack on an original iMac.

Also, the 50-50-40-pin drive connector cables in iMacs are used only because of the notebook optical drives used. The 50-pin parts must provide the (approximately) 40 normal IDE pins, in addition to analog audio and power (and maybe a couple others), to the CD drive, whereas the 40-pin part simply transfers normal desktop ATA-type stuff to the standard 3.5" hard drive.

 

[tomlee59]

Yes, superdisk drives can work quite nicely, whether IDE or USB or SCSI. Unlike the Zips they competed with, superdisks work with 1.44MB floppies, too. It's just too bad that they don't support the 800K formats that superdrives do.